Melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland may push up global sea levels more than 3 feet by the end of this century, according to a study published Sunday in the journal of “Nature Climate Change,” NBC News reported. Such a rise in the seas would displace millions of people from low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, swamp atolls in the Pacific Ocean, cause dikes in Holland to fail, and cost coastal mega-cities from New York to Tokyo billions of dollars for construction of sea walls and other infrastructure to combat the tides. "The consequences are horrible," Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the study told NBC News. Estimating how much sea levels will rise from ice sheet melting is one of the more challenging aspects of climate science. For the study, Bamber and colleague Willy Aspinall conducted a scientific poll with 26 of the world's leading glaciologists by asking them a series of questions about the behavior of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. The experts were handpicked to get a representative perspective of world leaders from the ice sheet modeling and observational fields.
